Who helps make Oscar winners? It's past time Academy Awards let casting directors win, too.
Casting directors recently achieved a huge victory when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally added a new Oscar category of casting for films released in 2025 and beyond.
The first Oscar ceremony was in 1929. The casting director job was created in the 1940s as the Hollywood studio system began dismantling and producers were no longer forced to hire actors on contracts at their studios. The first casting director received on-screen credit in 1972.
So why did it take the academy almost a hundred years to finally recognize our work?
“The casting director is your first advocate,” Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden told me. “And God knows we need many advocates in this business. Casting directors are the first to stand behind you and help push you forward, which is hugely important to an actor.”
Alan Cumming added: “It's great that the academy is finally acknowledging how essential and integral a casting director's work is. We only think about casting when it’s not working so well, and that is a testament to the nuance, care, and dedication to character and story that this group of the film community has delivered so often and for so long. Now is their time to be celebrated and for their work to be given its rightful place in the creative process.”
Now, casting directors could vote for Oscar winners but not win Oscars
The casting category is the first new one the academy has added since 2001. Marion Dougherty, a legendary casting director and the subject of Tom Donahue’s influential documentary "Casting By," had advocated for this category since the early 1990s. When "Casting By" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012, it lit the fire to continue the push.
In 2013, the academy added a branch for casting directors to vote. This was a precarious position: We could vote but not win. It would take another decade to get this new category added.
'Oppenheimer' vs. Oppenheimer:Oscar nominations recognize 'Oppenheimer,' but what about Americans still suffering from nuke tests?
As a child actor in the 1980s, legendary casting director Marcia Shulman gave me my first big break when she cast me in an off-Broadway play when I was 11. By age 12, I had my first epiphany, peering at the casting director from behind my signature purple glasses at a final callback for a TV movie.
She had identified two groups of kids to present to the ABC executives and the director. As the creative team deliberated over which group to choose, the casting director mediated their conversations and facilitated a calm experience – showing me that the job is a mix of digging deep to discover talent, populating the director’s vision by finding the actors to bring the story to life while navigating lots of egos and personalities. Mix in diplomacy and a photographic memory, too.
'Admire the world the casting director has built'
Having spent the past two decades as a casting director for film and TV, I've learned it’s a behind-the-scenes job that takes place long before the cameras roll.
Casting is an integral part of the film, like the cinematography, directing, costumes and sound.
Working with the Academy Award-nominated director Peter Bogdanovich to cast his final film, "She’s Funny That Way" from 2014, I was often the middle person communicating between him and the producers on deadline to hire actors and get everyone to set to make the best possible film.
You feel like a bartender, providing choices to the creative team. But even if you know the best option, you must let the director feel they have made the decision. Your role is to bring their vision to life.
Oscar, stand by them:In 'To Kill a Tiger,' a father stands by his assaulted daughter
“When you see a film, and you see the actors the casting directors have curated – the actors they’ve discovered, the risks that they’ve encouraged a director to often take – a penny drops about this other essential element of filmmaking,” Marcia Gay Harden noted. “Next time you watch a film, admire the world the casting director has built.”
When you watch the Oscars awards show Sunday, as we celebrate nominated performances, acknowledge the work of Ellen Lewis and Rene Haynes, who cast Lily Gladstone in "Killers of the Flower Moon,"and Susan Shopmaker (one of my casting mentors), who discovered Paul Giamatti’s young co-star Dominic Sessa in "The Holdovers."
After decades of demanding recognition for our craft, we will finally be on the red carpet at the Oscars in 2026, our turn to win.
Jen Rudin is the author of "Confessions of a Casting Director: Help Actors Land Any Role with Secrets from Inside the Audition Room," published by HarperCollins, and is the head of voice-over/animation at IAG.